


The Knight of the White Rose

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose, Witch of the Westmorland - Stan Rogers (Song)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Folklore, Healing Sex, Injury, Knights - Freeform, M/M, Magic, Master/Servant, Songfic, Talking Animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:26:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Come from the far West, wounded gravely in the Unclean Land, the knight from the West presses on to find the one who can heal him, the one who has called him from so far away: the White Rose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Knight of the White Rose

**Author's Note:**

> Those who are familiar with _Maiden Rose_ but not with “The Witch of the Westmorland” can find the song [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxls60aYSZA) and the full lyrics [here](https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/thewitchofthewestmorlands.html). If you know the song but not the manga, you can probably still enjoy the fic; it’s playing fast and loose with the latter canon.

The knight returned to the waking world slowly, and painfully.

It didn’t help that he lay athwart his own shield, made of the near-impenetrable heartwood of the laburnum. The pressure of his body atop it made the edges of his armor and the rings of his mail dig cruelly into his skin, despite the wolfskin cloak wrapped around him in lieu of a surcoat. But his wounds hurt far worse. He’d taken them to his chest and forearm in battle. Well before battle, his shoulder had been laid open when another had challenged his honor.

A healer he’d met along the road had given him the juice of poppies for it, as well as a silver flask of same to carry onto the battlefield. “The more you take,” the older man had warned, “the less ease it will give you.” But the knight had never been one for caution, which was why barely a mouthful remained in the flask and his shoulder was throbbing down to the bone. If the flesh hadn’t already taken infection, here in this empty land of poisonous vapors and befouled waters, he was sure it would soon. And so would the claw-marks in his chest and right forearm, where the enemy’s golden eagle had struck.

As he struggled not to close his eyes, he thought, _Give me the strength to move. Give me a reason to move._

That reason came in the form of something sharp tearing at the mangled flesh of his shoulder. With a bellow of fury he rolled away, and with his good hand he pushed up the visor of his helm to look at his attacker. It turned out to be a large raven, which flapped its wings at him, narrowed its beady eyes further, and croaked, “Serves you right. Serves you right.”

Fucking ravens. All of them were cowards, preying on the dead and the barely living, but the speaking ones, who’d been evil men and women in their former lives, were the worst of all. With an incoherent snarl the knight lashed out at the bird with his good arm. It hopped away about a foot, then continued to croak, “Serves you right. Serves you right.”

The knight then noticed two other ravens behind him. One was smaller than the others — a she-raven — with much glossier feathers than he’d ever seen on a raven in his life. And he’d seen a lot of ravens. The other newcomer was even larger than the first bird, though not quite as sturdy of body. There were white rings around its eyes. It peered steadily at the knight as though he were some sort of curiosity from the far reaches of the world. Which, he supposed, he was. Its beak seemed to curve into an eerie smile.

“Go away,” the knight grated. “All three of you bastards.”

“The dog-knight barks,” croaked the ring-eyed raven.

“Whimpers, more like,” said the she-raven, whose voice was like smoke from a pyre that had been decked with magnolia flowers.

“Will he find his way to the White Rose?” the ring-eyed one pondered aloud.

Suddenly the scent of rose petals filled the knight’s nostrils, cutting clear through the combined stench of blood, sweat, and noxious vapors. The clamoring of his wounds subsided slightly. “The White Rose?” he moaned.

“Did you not tell us to leave you be?” the she-raven inquired, almost purred.

“Which you haven’t,” the knight snapped. He wasn’t sure whether he’d rather have these damned birds talk at him in riddles or just pull out his entrails and let him be done with this world already.

“The White Rose is too pure for his like,” croaked the first raven, the one who’d pecked at his shoulder. “Why would you send this polluted creature to him?”

“Because I like to annoy you,” said the ring-eyed raven. “Foreign dog, if you can rise to your hind legs, I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

 _Well, you did ask for a reason,_ the knight told himself sourly as he braced his good hand on the dead white ground and pushed himself up. His chest hurt with every intake of breath, and his entire right arm continued to pulsate in a sick-making way, but he found he was able to stay on his feet without the world swaying before him. He managed to stoop again, retrieving his sword with his good hand and reaching around himself to sheathe it, then again to take up his shield.

“Well done,” the ring-eyed raven said. “Now turn, so that the wind lifts back the ears of your cloak.”

In other words, turn his face into the stinking breeze. With more and more suspicion that this was nothing more than what a raven would think of as a hilarious prank, the knight obeyed. He couldn’t see the wolf-ears on the hood of his cloak fly back with the wind, but the ring-eyed bird seemed satisfied. “Now, as you move in that direction, you’ll see Tsukiyomi-no-mikoto emerge from his shadow and your celestial namesake descend below that hill.”

“And the White Rose?” the knight demanded.

“You’ll meet the owl, who’ll guide you to him,” said the ring-eyed raven.

The knight grimaced. As much as he hated ravens, and as much as this one had helped him only as a jibe at his fellow raven, he owed it a debt of gratitude. Inclining his head such that it would not strain his shoulder, he said curtly, “Thank you, bird.”

“It’s all well,” said the ring-eyed raven, and then, more quietly and with a faint bitterness to his croak, “No knight should be sundered from his master.”

The knight didn’t know what to make of that, as, strictly speaking, he’d never had a master before. He’d had Companions, back in his homeland of Saxony, and to a man they were all dead in battle. Heartsore, he’d disappeared without word to anyone but his elder sister, and taken to the long, long road East across the continent. There was no reason or rhyme to it other than he could feel an instinct tugging him that way, a lodestone pull. Along the way he’d fought off enemy after enemy: other knights, common soldiers, tribal warriors, brigands. He knew little of the lands he sojourned through, other than that they’d been war-torn for generations with only the last few decades for respite. That respite now appeared to be over.

He’d never been told of the Unclean Land. Nothing grew here, not even the most stunted scrub or grass. The ground was a sour shade of white, and the streams and rivers ran a sickly yellow. He’d told himself many times over that if he’d known of it beforehand he’d have turned South instead, the pull of the East be damned.

Now he walked, more or less steadily, into the wind, and he forced himself to breathe deeply through his nose so that less of the poisonous vapors would enter his lungs. As he made his way, he kept an eye on the night sky. The Moon, which the people of the Eastern Country called The Exalted One, shone pale, nearly clear of its shadow now. When he half-turned to look behind him, taking care not to crane his neck lest his shoulder protest, Tenrō the Wolf of Heaven had begun to set behind a hill.

He’d not gone a long distance, he thought, when he felt the air stir beside him with silent wings. Something screamed at his feet, a tiny, shrill sound. The knight looked up, and there before him on a low tree limb was a massive grey owl, a red-backed vole in its beak. The knight wondered how it could have found anything to eat in the Unclean Land. But, well, it was going to give him instruction, so it was no ordinary owl.

The owl’s lurid yellow eyes, ringed many more times than the raven’s had been, settled coldly upon the knight as the bird all but inhaled its unhappy prey. Once its beak was clear, it spoke, and to the knight’s startlement it spoke in the voice of the healer. “What in the hell are you doing here?” it demanded.

“I’m looking for the White Rose,” the knight said.

“You drank all the poppy-juice already, didn’t you? Idiot.”

The knight couldn’t resist a wry grin. “Guilty as charged, sir.”

The owl shook its head; or, rather, its head rotated back and forth on what passed for its neck. “Keep going,” it said with a note of resignation. “Cross the Najiru River, and you’ll start to come into the Eastern Country. You’ll be able to tell because things will be growing around you again. Head uphill, past the woods, into the mountains. When you begin to see sakura trees, cut yourself an armful of flowering branches.”

“And then?” asked the knight.

“You’ll come to a deep, broad crater-lake ringed with brakefern. Bear around it. On its far side, through the mists, is a mountain pass, and beyond that is the winding water. Cast the branches into it, and you’ll find the White Rose.”

 

The first glow of dawn had but barely touched the eastern horizon as the knight gained the water he sought. Half-lake, half-river, it curved like a fat, lazy serpent across the land in both directions, reeds and high grass flanking its sides and conifer-woods in the distance beyond its opposite bank. In the dim he could make out what looked like alpine flowers, not quite the same ones he remembered from the high Saxon hills of his boyhood, studding the shorter grass all around. But roses were what scented the air, though not a single one was in sight.

Miles back he’d clumsily hewn himself a bundle of cherry branches with his shield-arm, and since then he’d been carrying them under that same arm. Tired and in pain though he was, and though the air was thin at this elevation, he realized that merely no longer breathing the vapors of the Unclean Land had improved his strength considerably. His impulse was to collapse to the reeds beneath him, but he forced himself to kneel instead at the water’s edge, pushing the rim of his shield down into the mud that it would stand without him holding it. He let the sakura branches fall to the grass. Once the shield was stable, he grasped them in his left hand and hurled them into the water.

It began to eddy and churn, drops flying in all directions. He ducked behind his shield as drops became sheets, and though the lacquered hardwood protected him from the brunt of it, the edges of his fur cloak were soaked in short order. As the torrents ceased, the smell of roses grew stronger. The knight raised his head above the shield’s upper rim. And gaped.

Growing out of the water when it had not been there a moment before was a thick, tough stem, not an inch of it free of thorns. But the stem didn’t terminate in a calyx and flower. A few feet above the water, its woody substance began to turn into the pale flesh of a very young man from the waist up. His naked half-body was muscular after a wiry fashion, and he had the thick black hair and the tilted black eyes of the people of the Eastern Country. His face was small and delicate, almost like that of a doll. But nothing in his eyes spoke of fragility.

Something burst from the distant woods behind the man-flower. The knight gaped again to see a pure-white steed racing toward the lake. Even so far away and in the lingering night-gloom he could tell it was splendidly bred: the fire-spirit and cleverness of the Eastern breeds, married to the clean build, rangy yet strong, of the all-enduring horse found on the mountainous fringes of Eurote. At its heels ran a tiger-hound, baying furiously, and over its head wheeled a sparrowhawk.

The hound remained on the far bank, though it continued to bark angrily, and the hawk came to sit on its head. But the horse leapt clear across the waters, passing the man-flower on his right by a good three yards — and wheeled about and began to charge the knight.

Pain singing through his thews, he got to his feet, tugging the shield from the mud and holding it before him. He’d no sooner put his right hand to the hilt of his sword, resigning himself to the agony that would come from hefting it with his bad arm, when at the last possible moment the beast checked. It stood rigidly in place, its nostrils flaring, and all its well-shaped muscles straining upward from its hooves. Though its coat glowed white under the sinking moon, its wide eyes were dark. With a sharp burst of what he’d thought was well-buried sorrow the knight recalled his own steed, who’d succumbed to battle-wounds before they’d entered the Unclean Land.

“I cannot,” said the white horse. “I cannot trample him, Master.”

“Who has ordered you to trample him?” the man-flower demanded in a voice that reminded the knight of the sweetest birdsong. The horse, not replying, stood trembling on the near bank. “Disarm yourself,” the man-flower said to the knight in his musical voice. “He will not hurt you. Nor will I.”

Grimacing, the knight managed to draw his sword slowly from its scabbard, and he let it drop to the bank along with his shield. When his hands were empty, he tentatively put the right one out, beckoning the white horse closer. It stood whuffling for a long minute before it stepped delicately forward and nuzzled the knight’s palm.

“My steed would not so gently approach any man who meant me harm,” the man-flower said.

The knight turned abruptly, his lips curling at the pull on his freshly strained shoulder. “Are you the White Rose?”

The man-flower began to speak again, but then he turned halfway around as the tiger-dog behind him began to bark more loudly. The sparrowhawk pecked once at its skull. This elicited a low, indignant whine, and the hound settled down on the bank with its paws out before it and the bird of prey still on its head. The lips of the White Rose, as full and as sweet-looking as rosebuds themselves, twitched as he turned to face the knight again.

“I am. You come from the far West, in answer to my call. To be mine. To accept me as your master.”

“I…” The knight blinked. “I come from the far West, yes. But I don’t know why, other than that I couldn’t bear to remain in my homeland, and I felt something pulling me East. In the Unclean Land, a raven told me to seek you out for healing, and then an owl told me where to find you.”

“Can you heal him, Master,” the hound suddenly demanded, “without despoiling yourself?”

The small, delicate face looked infinitely sad. “I … I don’t know. But I’ve called him so far away from his home, and he’s borne so many wounds to get here. Perhaps the gods mean for me to risk my purity for him… or to offer it up to him.”

“And if that is not what the gods intend, Master?” the sparrowhawk asked warily. The knight didn’t like the look of its beady little eyes on him any more than he’d liked those of the ravens.

“All we can do, my good hawk, is trust our best intuitions and see where they lead us,” the White Rose said. “Knight… close your eyes.”

The knight obeyed, tilting his head up to bathe in the sun, breathing in deeply of the blossom-scented air and sighing on the exhale.

“Open them now.”

Standing before him on the bank was the same young man, but entirely human in form — and entirely naked. He was a head and a half shorter than the knight. His hips were slender, two diagonal lines cut deeply into his groin, and they converged upon the most beautiful cock the knight had ever seen: small but hard, a creamy white shading into a soft rose-pink.

“That’s a much nicer prick than the ones you had before,” the knight said slyly. The young man blushed deeply, his eyes flickering off to one side before they resolutely met the knight’s again. The knight suppressed a frown. Purity was all well and good, but he was surprised that such a powerful being would act like a shy young girl at what he himself considered a fairly mild bawdy joke.

The White Rose turned to face the horse, which was now staring at the ground and pawing it uneasily. “Off with you,” he said. “All three of you. Before the sun comes up.” The knight saw that the hawk and the hound had also averted their faces from their master’s nakedness — _his_ master’s nakedness, now. The horse stepped delicately back across the water, and as it trotted back into the pines the other two beasts followed it docilely.

The knight turned back to the White Rose, and softly he said, “All jesting aside, you are very beautiful.” Despite his weariness and his wounds, his own cock had begun to swell beneath his gambeson.

A fresh blush stained the Rose’s cheeks. In a businesslike manner he asked, “Can you undress without help?”

The question startled the knight anew. The shieldbearer relieved the master of his armor, not the other way around. “Let me try.”

The attempt lasted no more than half a minute. “You’re turning grey,” the White Rose said with a frown. “You came here to be healed, not to test yourself further. Unfasten your cloak for me.”

The knight had not heard an order in many, many months. It struck a chord deep inside him, a chord of correctness, as if the world were being set right side up again. He undid the brooch that held the wolfskin to his back. Before it could land on the grass, the White Rose caught it and folded it as neatly as one can fold a wolfskin before laying it down. “Hand me the brooch,” he said. The knight obeyed, and the Rose set the pin atop the cloak.

“Kneel to me.”

Never had any order rung out so sweetly, as sweet as the scent of roses.

The knight half-sank, half-crumbled to his knees, and the young man moved about him with the deftness of a hummingbird. He lifted the knight’s heavy helm from his head with both hands before setting it beside the cloak, then untied his arming cap. As he tossed it atop the helm, he ran gentle fingers through the knight’s matted hair. The knight was all too keenly aware that not only had he just emerged from the Unclean Land, he’d not washed in far too many days. But the White Rose said nothing more than, “As golden as your eyes.”

Off next came the gorget, baring the knight’s throat, then the pauldrons from his shoulders. The Rose removed the gauntlet from each hand, then vambrace and couter and rerebrace as he worked his way up the knight’s arm. Once he’d divested him of his skirted breastplate, he asked, “Can you manage your mail?”

The knight frowned. The hauberk, without fail, always caught in his hair. He shook his head and lifted his arms. The White Rose knelt and lifted the chain-mail shirt at its hem, then drew it off the knight’s head. Of course, it caught in his hair. He suppressed a rueful laugh, but he spied the smile darting around the corners of the Rose’s lush lips again as the small young man gently freed the fair strands from the loops of steel.

“Unlace?” the Rose asked, and, yes, the knight felt fairly sure he could loosen his gambeson all on his own. Once the laces were undone, the Rose lifted the padded shirt off his arms, baring him to the waist. The mountain breeze stirred the pale hair on his chest, and his nipples hardened and darkened to its caress. He thought he saw the Rose’s tongue, small and pink, touch his lips. But all the young man said was, “Rise, my knight.”

It felt wrong, somehow, to have this noble flower of a man kneeling naked to him while he towered above him, still partly clothed and partly armored. But he obediently raised one leg, then the other, so that the White Rose could remove the sabatons from his feet, the greaves from his calves, the poleyns from his knees, and the cuisses from his thighs. When every piece of leg-armor lay in the grass with its kindred, the Rose, looking upward with a soft smile, tugged gently at the tops of the knight’s chausses. The mail-hose came away with the linen underclothes and woolen stockings beneath.

The White Rose continued to smile beatifically up at the naked knight — who was utterly unprepared to be grabbed by his calves and pitched ass over head into the winding water. He came up sputtering and shaking his head like a great dog, and he glared at the one who’d thrown him in, torn between indignation and admiration: the knight was not a small man in any way. “What the—?”

When the White Rose’s smile broadened, it was like walking from the Unclean Land into the Eastern Country all over again. “Look down at yourself.”

The knight had assumed that the Rose’s bursting from the water had sent the sakura branches scattering to the winds. But three of them seemed to have changed themselves into bandages — bandages that were still, somehow, made of cherry wood and cherry blossoms — and wound themselves about his shoulder, upper arm, and forearm. A mass of petals covered the claw-marks in his chest.

“And the water has cleansed you, too,” the White Rose said, stepping forward to the edge of the water. He leaned forward and held out his hand: fingers splayed wide, palm naked, unguarded, open.

The knight gingerly extended his right hand; it would not do to take his master’s in his left. The wounds beneath the bandages ached, but there was not the grinding agony of before. He was on his feet only long enough to come up out of the winding water. The tall grass rose around the two of them like the canopy of a grand bed as they sank into it.

It was at that moment the sun surged up over the eastern bank, painting the world around them in soft blues and vibrant greens. But the knight had no eyes for those colors, not now. He thought he had never seen anything as brilliantly white as the lithe, lean flesh of the White Rose beneath him. He stared down, willing the young man’s body to burn itself into his eyes, into his mind.

The Rose leaned up on his elbows and took the knight’s head in both his hands. His lips felt as soft as they looked as they brushed against the knight’s: once, twice, a third time. But no tongue slipped out from between them to seek its partner. The knight’s eyes opened, and he chuckled. “Don’t you kiss with tongues in this country?”

“I…” The White Rose turned a deep pink again and looked away.

“You do it like this,” the knight said quietly. He was far too aware of the delicacy of the Rose’s face in his massive hands, the fragile bones that housed the savage spirit, as he drew his lips across those of his master and slid his tongue into the Rose’s mouth. The Rose’s touched his lightly, his lack of certainty and experience all too obvious. The knight let his own tongue sweep within, deeply and wetly. When he drew back, the taste of rosewater still clinging to his tongue, there was a dazed, almost drunken look in the black eyes.

“That is how you kiss, my master. At least, how you kiss another’s mouth.”

“There are other kisses?” the White Rose said, his musical voice grown husky.

“There are many other kisses,” the knight murmured, and he lowered his mouth to the perfect curve of the Rose’s jaw. 

The noble flower tilted his head back instinctually, baring the elegant lines of his neck and throat. The knight did not stint them of kisses, either, his lips and tongue moving ceaselessly to pay tribute to the soft, snowy skin. Down the Rose’s firm breast he worked, and when his lips touched a jutting nipple, the Rose gasped, “Ah!”

The knight smiled around the little jewel of flesh as he sucked at it. The Rose’s thick black lashes fluttered against his cheek, and he moaned again. The knight didn’t miss the small fists, undoubtedly as powerful as they were delicate, clenching in the grass as the Rose heaved himself up like a sea-wave against the knight’s ravenous mouth.

From nipple to nipple the knight darted, sucking hard, then flicking the tip of his tongue over the ends. The small graceful body beneath him squirmed, vibrating with the intensity of the Rose’s awakened lust. From his vantage point at his nipples the knight watched his face: rosebud lips parted and emitting soft little gasps, eyes closed, cheeks tinted the color of red Saxon wine.

As the knight slid his mouth down over the Rose’s ribs, he reached down and encircled that exquisitely pretty cock with his right hand. The Rose cried out and jerked in his arms. “So wet,” the knight murmured, fingertips sliding in the early seed. “You’re so wet for me.”

“St—,” the Rose began, then bit his plump lower lip.

“But you don’t want me to stop, do you,” the knight whispered against the Rose’s flat belly, under which the muscles rippled and twitched. He slipped his thumb over the wet, straining head to find and stroke the sensitive niche beneath. The Rose made a noise like _hnnh_ and turned his head to one side; the knight could see the flushes of shame and desire fighting one another across the fine bones of his face. “Your gods wouldn’t have given you such beauty if they didn’t mean for it to be savored. And I am so hungry, my master. So hungry. Let me have my fill.”

The Rose, his right fist pressed to his mouth, didn’t reply. The knight had fought too many battles and lain in too many beds not to know when to take his opportunity. He pressed his tongue to the tip of the Rose’s cock. The dripping early seed was sweet, so sweet against his tongue, cleaner than any man’s he’d ever tasted.

“What… what are you…” 

The knight lifted his head an inch to take in the Rose’s face. Though his eyes were even blacker than before, the pupils swollen full, the Rose looked shocked, as though the knight were doing something unspeakably perverse. Another “St—” issued from his lips, but it ground away in another _hnnh_ sound. He gasped his lungs full, then whimpered, “Don’t!”

The knight raised his head a little more. “It doesn’t feel good?” he asked, the words slurred by the movement of his mouth over that beautiful, sensitive cockhead.

“It’s… no… it feels good…” Now it was the Rose who couldn’t find his own breath in the slender mountain air. “But … you shouldn’t… you’ll get your lips dirty.”

It took nearly all his might not to laugh. _He_ was going to soil _his_ mouth on _the White Rose?_ At that, doing something he and every other knight in the world who favored men in his bed had done hundreds of times before, something that required no more “cleansing” than a swallow of wine? He let himself smile, though, and he looked up softly at his master. “They won’t get dirty,” he whispered, and he swirled the Rose’s seed around on his tongue, letting it coat his lips before licking it off again. “See?”

His master was more a red than a white Rose now, every inch of his skin bright with bloodflow and slick with sweat. He didn’t reply to the knight, just threw his head back again and moaned tremulously. The sound unleashed something ferocious marrow-deep inside in the knight, and he sucked the Rose’s straining cock as far into his throat as he could, mouth working fiercely around it, broad arms spreading the Rose’s thighs as wide as they would go.

The Rose cried out again, and again, fingernails scoring the knight’s shoulders, hips slamming with abandon into his face. Pleas for the knight to stop formed on his lips and died amid gasps and moans, each pitched higher than the last. The knight began to feel the telltale trembling in the Rose’s thighs and hips, the stiffening of his entire body. He tightened his lips as hard as he could around the Rose’s cock and sucked at it for all he was worth.

Though he was lying in the grass, the Rose’s body arched so hard that, for the longest moment, the knight imagined him suspended in the air. The tremors coursed up and down it as his seed flowed out of him, endlessly it seemed. The knight swallowed as much as he could but had to pull off to breathe, and the rest of it splashed on the Rose’s inner thighs and over the knight’s face and hands. At last the Rose lay limp, hair a sweaty tangle, eyes closed, lips parted, as the last waves of pleasure ebbed from him.

It was the most beautiful thing the knight had ever seen.

The Rose’s eyes opened, then widened. He sat up on his elbows and said, looking mortified, “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Didn’t mean to what?” the knight asked indolently as he raised a sticky hand to his mouth and, like a cat savoring stolen cream, slowly licked away every drop. The Rose’s breath began to shorten again. “You are my master,” the knight said as the last of it disappeared between his lips. “I will take all of you.”

The Rose’s huge eyes had flickered down the knight’s body to his cock. Unlike the Rose’s, it was not small at all. He bit his lip again, this time in patent apprehension.

“Open yourself to me,” the knight whispered. “Completely. Let me see all of you. I’ll go as slowly as you need me to go.”

The Rose’s cheeks must have been scalded by his blush. But he acquiesced, tilting up his hips and wrapping his forearms around his knees that he could spread his thighs even more widely than the knight had before. The knight swiped a broad thumb over the delicate pink hole, then gave a soft grunt of surprise. “You’re wet here, too. It feels like oil. Your gods must have made you wet.” The Rose shuddered at the touch and whimpered, closing his eyes again.

Entering the White Rose as slowly as he could took every ounce of patience the knight knew he possessed and reserves of it he hadn’t known he had. “So tight,” he ground out between his teeth when he was halfway in, feeling the Rose quiver underneath him, around him. The man-flower’s own teeth were clenched, his knuckles white around a clump of river reeds. The knight took a deep breath, stilled himself, let the Rose accustom himself to the new girth, and pressed on and in. When he felt the hot embrasure of the Rose’s inner thighs around his hips, his stones nestling into the lower curves of the Rose’s buttocks, he murmured, “Master… I’m inside you. So… hot.”

He had no idea where he found the patience to withdraw from that first inward thrust, still ever so slowly. Maybe the gods had him by the hips. Fucking the Rose with him. Did they want to fuck the Rose themselves? Were they fucking him _through_ the knight? The thoughts blanched his own knuckles white as he forced himself not to ram his cock like a siege engine back into the Rose’s body. “All… right?” he gasped.

“I….” The little nodule in the Rose’s lovely white throat bobbed as he spoke. “I’m fine.”

The knight, leaning on the elbow of his good arm, took the Rose’s left nipple between his right thumb and forefinger. The Rose made sweet little gasps again as the knight tweaked it. “I want you to be more than fine,” the knight whispered. “I know it’s your first time… but I want you to feel good. If you can.”

“It …. it feels good, what you’re doing to my … to my chest,” the Rose said, and his mouth flattened with distaste as though he’d just spoken the filthiest curse imaginable.

“I wish I could suck your nipples while I’m fucking you,” the knight said, just to watch the Rose’s face flame again, and was surprised to watch his lips part this time instead of tighten and his eyes close again. “I wish I could suck your cock while I’m fucking your ass, my master. Your seed is so delicious.” The Rose moaned, and the knight dared, “I want to put my mouth on your ass, too.”

The Rose’s eyes flew open, and he looked even more appalled than when the knight had begun to suck his cock. “You can’t do that! That’s _dirty!”_

The knight smiled broadly. “I told you. I’ll take all of you. If you trust me not to soil you, I trust that you won’t soil me.”

He didn’t expect the thick black lashes to suddenly glisten with tears.

“Master…?”

“I… I’m fine,” the Rose said huskily. “Don’t stop. Please.”

By now the Rose was loose enough that the knight could thrust into him without too much difficulty, though he paced himself nonetheless. “So beautiful,” he whispered down into the doll-like face. “So beautiful when you come. I want to make you come a thousand more times, I want to watch you cover me and yourself with your seed while you gasp and blush and moan…” The Rose turned his head away, his cheeks bright red again, and pressed his open palm to his mouth. “I want to take all of you, Master. I want to fill myself up with you, just like I’m filling you up with myself. I want you filling up all the hollow places inside me—”

He choked on his last words as his climax came upon him, and he uttered a long, guttural groan as he felt his own seed spurt from him. The Rose shuddered beneath him, twitching, sluggish seed trickling from his cock. The knight could feel the vibrations drilling into his own cock as the Rose’s body milked out his last drops. For a long moment he braced himself above the Rose’s body, panting, letting his cock soften before he withdrew—

—was bracing himself with both hands. And not a twinge in the right arm, from fingertips to shoulder.

The knight let himself register that fact. Then he eased himself out of the Rose’s body and lay beside him, pulling him close. The man-flower’s trembling subsided as he pressed his damp skin against that of the knight, who brushed his lips against the Rose’s earlobe.

“I think you’ve healed me,” he said. “Do you feel … impure, at all?”

The Rose shook his sweaty bangs. “I feel … the same. Good. But no different than before.”

“Just as I thought,” the knight said.

The Rose half-sat up and drew his fingers once again through the knight’s hair. “You should sleep,” he said. “Then eat and drink before you go. I’ll rinse your undergarments in the waters.”

The knight made a soft noise of assent and closed his eyes for what had to have been no more than two seconds. But when he opened them the sun was high overhead.

He sat up and looked around. The White Rose was nowhere to be seen, not even on his stem amid the waters.

Suddenly there was a flutter of leaves from the distant woods. The tiger-hound bounded out from them, a hare in his mouth. He splashed across the waters and deposited the dead animal at the knight’s side. “My master bid me bring you this,” he said, keeping his eyes averted from the knight’s naked loins. “He releases you, for now, into the field.”

“Thank you,” the knight said gravely. He looked around and spotted his undergarments high up on the bank some yards away, laid flat out in the sun. Though it was far from high summer, they seemed to have already dried. He walked to them and put on, for now, the gambeson and linens. When he looked back at the dog, it seemed relieved.

He found a small pile of dry sakura branches not far away from where his clothes had been laid out. From his belt he took his hunting-knife, and he set to whittling himself a spit and supports, then to skinning the hare. He tossed the offal to the dog, which set upon it with a snarl of delight. With flint and steel, the knight lit the fire, which roasted the little creature quickly while the knight drank his fill and refilled the silver flask. He made short work of the hare, and the winding water washed the grease from his hands.

When he looked up again at the dog, its tail was wagging. The knight gave the animal a broad, lazy smile and scratched the top of its head. It licked a last dab of grease from his palm that the water had left behind. “I will return to your master,” the knight said, looking out over the water. “Our master.”

“I know you will,” the hound said, and it scampered back to the other bank and disappeared into the woods as the knight began to don his armor and wolfskin once again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [undomielregina](http://archiveofourown.org/users/undomielregina) for looking this over.
> 
> Sacrificing the companion animals’ traditional coloring to the needs of _Maiden Rose_ canon (as well as the fact that they belong to the knight and not the witch), I envisioned Asuza as a hybrid of the [Kiso](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiso_Horse) and [Kabada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabarda_horse) horses, Date as a [kai ken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Ken), and Moriya as a [Japanese sparrowhawk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_sparrowhawk). I was going to make Suguri a [Japanese scops owl](http://ibc.lynxeds.com/files/pictures/japanese_scops_owl_j_pm.jpg), but then I decided to go for a [great grey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_grey_owl), even if its habitat is a little bit too far north.
> 
> Tenrō (the Celestial Wolf) is the Japanese name for Sirius.


End file.
